Get the same job working for government. Work stability in government is unparalleled, and there is so much cruft and technical debt that you will literally spend up until your last breath fixing legacy code and trying to get people off ancient software systems.
You will stagnate, and nobody will give a shit. People will come and go next to you, but you will be stable through the ages, like a pillar in an ancient Roman temple... Seasons will leave behind memories, but the winds will not take you with them. You will prevail, no matter what. Maybe forgotten, maybe overlooked, but more certainly not underestimated.
This basically shows why DOGE is a thing. This sort of attitude is why governments are slow to achieve anything, why any government contract ends up over budget, etc...
If the government was a dynamic work environment, it would burn just as much money. But instead of saying "the project went over budget", they'd say "we executed a strategic pivot."
Instead of employees "stagnating", employees would launch all sorts of initiatives and then abandon them after getting promoted.
Instead of maintaining legacy systems for decades, teams would turn down systems so that employees can work on shinier greenfield projects, leaving users in the lurch.
I do not oppose government efficiency. I support reforms to identify and eliminate waste in government. Unfortunately that's not what DOGE is doing.
I work in consulting. The best bet is not to work for the government. But to work for a consulting company that contracts with the government. You will get paid more. I use to work for a consulting department that focused on the public sector.
Even with that, work security in government is still unparalleled. In the private sector, if the chief executive wanted to lay off 90% of the workforce, they could.
Compare the downsizing of Twitter to the downsizing of the government.
Yep, I'm a federal contractor working in NIH as a data scientist, and completely agree with the above comment.
Before November, I would have said the same thing as the parent comment. After January 20th, everyone who is left is currently looking for backups in case they get laid off.
Gov and fed contractor positions used to be the most stable jobs you could get. Now, they are just as uncertain as industry jobs. It's extremely unfortunate.
I'd say that they are more uncertain than industry jobs at this point, unless you're talking about companies that have recently been taken over by private equity where the new owners intend to gut the place and sell off the parts.
> unless you're talking about companies that have recently been taken over by private equity where the new owners intend to gut the place and sell off the parts.
Off topic, but this is starting to feel like the rule rather than the exception. This practice should not be legal.
I don't think it's that different from the private sector. I've been with my current employer for almost 7 years. The company has been sold twice with layoffs. My manager, who hired me years ago, is leaving.
yeah... There is always a niche in government. Plus, I haven't heard of many layoffs affecting software teams in government. Some people are so deeply rooted in their specific concerns that taking them out of a codebase is borderline like cutting the wrong cable on a bomb.
In the U.S., maybe somewhere like Naval Undersea Warfare Centers (at least when I worked there).
The problems they're solving are pretty constant, but they go very deep technically for those who are interested. There's a very long learning curve compared to most private sector jobs, but you can power through it in proportion to your personal ambitions.
Downsides: (1) You're a political punching bag for 50% of the candidates in each federal election, except in years where military power is on the electorates' minds. (2) Mediocre pay. (3) Soul-crushing bureaucracy. (4) It's the only job I've ever had where the employer has missed payroll.
Other pros: (1) Working with the same folks for many years can be nice. (2) Within limits, national defense is really important. If you want it done well, this is an opportunity to pitch in.
Caveat: invading Greenland or Panama isn't what I'd call "national defense". But the learning curve / hiring process are too cumbersome to quit and rejoin every 4 years depending on politics. I know of no good solution to this one.
I interviewed at NUWC Keyport when I was in college. Seemed like an interesting place to work but they didn’t have any real programming roles at the time. My interviewer asked if I had experience with UML and talked about how he wanted someone to document and optimize their assembly line procedures. I’m not sure he knew exactly what he wanted.
In my experience, tasking was really department-specific.
On the bright side, once you were inside and got your bearings, it was reasonably easy to get transferred to a department that better suited one's interests.
"National defense" as defense of nation's interests. Politicians can phrase it however they like. Pay is meh, benefits are pretty good if you locked into 0.4% FERS deduction prior 2013, that's like 16% annualized compounding... health insurance is getting less and less attractive by the year. Salary growth is also slow and next few years probably gonna be a big fat zero and eaten alive by inflation. Like OP said, it does feel like turning into a rock solid pillar and getting forgotten.
One option is to find a job that has legacy work. A good place to look is a non-tech company. IE: a company that might use tech to run the business (which you will support), but tech isn't their main product. These companies tend be using older software because they aren't really required to have the latest and greatest.
Lots of large tech firms have defined career ladders with a concept of terminal levels - typically senior level beyond which there is no up-or-out expectation of growth. I think small and midsize companies that focus on fast growth will often carry this expectation, so I'd avoid those. Alternatively: small non-startups or large companies beyond their prime (again, lack of company-wide focus on rapid growth is key here).
Even there giving the impression of not wanting to advance is often a good way to mark yourself as a "low performer". A savvy understanding of politics is required in these circumstances.
Promos before the terminal level are easy because your manager wants to retain you. After the terminal level, they're used as carrots to squeeze more work out of you. One scenario to look out for is the company doing well. You realize your RSUs are worth more than job hopping, so you aim for adequate, but the company doesn't like that you opted out of the staff promo rat race.
these are the first people to go in times of trouble or politics, which is a real shame because the bulk of work in almost all companies is done by solid, experienced workers, not rockstar hierarchy climbers
> Has anyone worked somewhere that they felt they could just do their job without worrying about the career advancement aspect?
That's every place I've ever worked, to be honest, including tech megacorps. Lots of places will put a lot of emphasis on career advancement, but I've never seen anyone punished for not doing it. I'm not counting "won't get promoted" as a punishment, for obvious reasons.
My non-tech company seems to also have this up or out mentality. They don't have a specific timeline, but if you're a midlevel for too long like me, they definitely try to manage you out. I've had a few friends who are managers confirm this.
Yeah, you can run into it anywhere. When I was in the pizza delivery business in my early 20s, once you got into management, there was very much an up-or-out mentality. You couldn't just be a really good assistant manager; you were pushed to move up to manager and then to a bigger store and so on. It just seems to bother the climbers to see someone content to stay in the position he knows he's best suited for.
The key is to keep switching teams. If you stay in same team for a long time, your manager will start pushing you for promotion, either because they like you and start feeling bad for you or maybe they are pressured by their higher ups.
Thirded. Plenty of 40+ geezers on trading desks who have been doing the same job for a decade or two (although that job changes constantly, of course).
Try to look for small/medium non-tech companies. There's quite a few out there that have dev teams but their primary product or service isn't software. The downside to that though is pay likely won't be as good as big tech, and sometimes they can be hit or miss with being able to work on exciting or new stuff.
I work for a medium-ish company (around 250 employees), and we're just a small team two devs, and a sysadmin basically and are pretty autonomous and there's no "up or out" expectation for anyone here.
There's definitely downsides - no one outside of our team has any technical ability whatsoever so communicating requirements back and forth is difficult, and a lot of the work is boring business CRUD and integrating SaaS products together, but it pays well enough and I love being pretty much autonomous on our small team. Most days it just fees like I'm a contractor.
All that being said, I'm almost 40 so I don't mind the boring enterprisey work. In my younger years this job would've burned me out super fast, just something to keep in mind.
Maybe just job-hop. Sure, you're a senior for 10 years at one company, then be a senior at another company for another 10 years. I know that's easier said than done, and could run into ageism as you get older.
I keep hearing about this "ageism" but it's never made sense to me. I would always want to hire an older, wiser developer, if I were calling the shots. Why is this a thing?
I'm 50+ and it's a thing, but not really different than any other bias lots of people here likey deal with. It's not legit but does make sense: any groups that you don't identify with are assessed differently based on the delta. Sometimes this is positive; most times negative.
Just one example: I was working at Stanford in the Med School and one of the admin people was forced out simply for the crime of being "old" without any specific performance problem or inability.
Another anecdotal negative confirmation: When I was 19, I was constantly offered jobs. You don't hear me singing that tune anymore.
Older wiser developer has less tolerance for bullshit and wants higher pay. Older wiser developer is less likely to be on a visa because they've probably been working in the country for a while. They're less likely to be foreign as well because the giant surge of foreigners (Indian/Chinese) coming to US is something that has happened in the last 15 years. If you have 20+ years of experience in the US, you're much more likely to be American or at least a citizen or have a greencard.
In all senses, older developers want more and have a better positioning to negotiate from. For capitalists, this is exactly what they don't want.
It's not really ageism as much as it is the associations that come with older age. If you were as naive, desperate, and cheap as a new grad - you'd get more easily hired too. Oh and a lot of older devs don't like the grindy leetcode nature of interviews because it takes a lot of time outside of work to study for and they prefer to do other things with their time. (In half of my FAANG interviews, I get asked LC Hard problems regularly. The bar to pass is very high.)
- 2012 (37) - reached out to third party recruiters via LinkedIn
- 2014 (40) - reached out to internal recruiter on LinkedIn
- 2016 (42) - reached out to a recruiter I met earlier.
- 2018 (44) - reached out to a recruiter I met earlier
- 2020 (46) - Amazon (AWS Professional Services) recruiter reached out to me.
- 2023 (49) - targeted outreach to a recruiter based on a niche of niche within AWS where I was an SME.
- 2024 - responded to recruiter who reached out to me.
To be fair, in 2020, I did pivot from “software developer” to working in cloud consulting specializing in app dev - working full time for consulting departments/companies
Reframe it - no job has ever advanced you career wise. There's no curriculum, it's just a random hodpodge of tech stacks and features. If you advanced, that was on you. There was no professor or tutor there, no gun to your head, certainly no mom or dad. It was just you, your drive, your talent, and whatever you perceived as a challenge or trial. If you want to stop advancing, that's on you, as it always was.
Most companies have a similar profile. There's an up-or-out phase and then there's some level where it no longer matters. Because titles are all over the place it's hard to predict what that level is. But it roughly translates to the point where your value exceeds your cost. For most software companies this is usually the point where one is a very capable IC, able to work independently, as well as able to guide & mentor more junior employees. YMMV
It will never be the case that it's okay to coast for a long time at the lower/middle levels because in the grand scheme of things you're not worth the hassle for them.
Try to think of this from the organisation's point of view. The up or out culture serves two purposes. It helps ensure senior roles go to people they know well and trust, and it ensures there is room for other ambitious and motivated people to move up.
In other words the whole objective is to have a well run organisation with motivated employees. The objective is definitely not to force hard working and talented people to leave.
If you are hard working and talented it's incredibly unlikely they will want to push you out and then go through the whole process of hiring and training a replacement. It's worth having a conversation with your manager before looking for a new job.
Yes. Once I was leaving a managerial role for a lateral transfer and helped choose my replacement. One candidate was a high performing individual contributor. They felt obligated to apply for the job, but didn't really want it. They liked their current job and did it well. They were assured that they're welcome to continue as an IC at their current level as long as they continue to perform at their current level.
Worked out great. They have their role and continue to enjoy it and perform well. The managerial role went to someone with clear upward intention, who is also enjoying it and performing well.
Personally working in smaller companies, startups (the scene probably ends somehow in 1-3 years) and academic organizations (professors have a career path, staff not) I find that no advancement is a norm.
Startups though, ugh. Maybe tomorrow you will end up a millionaire with stock, or you're eating catfood and hoping the grocery bill difference will be enough to pay the mortgage next month while you desperately look for a job in the worst economy since 2008. If there's an in-between, I've never seen it personally.
There are zombie startups. The business has stalled out, but breaks even. The staff and investors are checked out. Ambitious product people show up with big ideas that never work and then leave. They keep going until someone finds a buyer or the business fails.
The ones I worked at paid me decently in terms of cash except for the one I tried to start myself. In those cases I was wanted for special skills and experience and not being a generic applications developer.
It's not unusual for people, in the case of an acqui-hire, to get a payout of $250k or so.
You'll work 60hrs a week "hardcore" for a Musk type for stock with a blackout period and multiple risks of massive dilution in any or all funding rounds.
Most startups will fail or "exit" with a sale that profits only a few key investors and insiders.
But eating catfood is always an good idea no matter your net worth.
Completeness is more important than optimal balance. For example, a high protein diet is no good if you get scurvy because cats produce their own vitamin C and you don't (although dogs also don't need vitamin C, which suggests that a pet-food-only diet needs to include at least some guinea pig food)
Qualcomm, at least until I left in 2017, had two parallel career tracks, one for management and another for individual contributors. Both had equal pay grades. It was up to you whether you wanted to follow one or the other.
So if your concern is that you don't want to become a manager while still being well paid, that is an option. Other than that, the culture was pretty nice, especially in the Markham (Canada) office.
Dual ladders is pretty common, though not equal pay IME, but I'd bet there's still a stigma attached to anyone who's not trying to move up one of those career paths?
Second this. Public administration or sth. like that has no real growth targets and will therefore probably be more "relaxed" on that matter. Also that can be very valuable work if you provide good services to the people that live there.
Anecdotally, Netflix is very "settle into your groove and get really good at your job" if you want it to be. There are of course folks that climb the ladder, but I also work with several L5's (Senior engineers) who have been at that level for years. Some of this of course has to do with the introduction of levels being quite recent (within the last 4 years or so) but the majority of folks I know that have been here for 10+ years are at L5 (Senior Engineer, which is like 70% of the engineering staff). The vast majority of folks stay in their hired levels for their entire time at the company, and the salary increases are steady year-to-year. I'm personally trying to push my career forward into either L6 or management eventually, but I also get the distinct feeling that if I decided to settle into my role and not advance that I'd still be here and quite happy 5 years from now.
They introduced levels 2.5 years ago. Almost all existing engineers were converted to L5 at that time (I was told ~90% during a recent job interview there). A very small number of L6s were created when they introduced levels (something like 20 according to my interviewer). L4s are post-9/2022 hires.
All of which is to say, the fact that most people are L5s, including people who've been there for a long time, is due entirely to the very recent introduction of leveling and the high bar for L6. It tells you nothing on its own about whether L5 is perceived as a terminal level.
You'd know better than us if you work there, and reading between the lines of your comment it sounds like maybe it is?
I worked for all kinds of companies, big and small, corporate and startups, and I thought very few of them had much of the “up or out” mentality or even opportunities. So every time I wanted “up”, I basically moved elsewhere. It seemed to me that most teams and most people actually prefer that stability and didn’t push others either.
I've mostly worked as an IC and a manager in technical organizations outside of VC backed startup land. In those orgs I've found that most places consider 'Senior Engineer' to be a terminal level. By that I mean until you get to senior engineer it us up or out. In fact, as I manager, I've had explicit timelines on which I've had to get people to senior, or manage them out. Once you DO get to senior engineer they are happy to let you stay there forever because a) senior engineers are what keeps the tech org going day to day b) the staff+ path and management path are not just 'up' from senior - they are actually different jobs from senior requiring a different skillset. The downside of this is don't expect anything more than cost-of-living increases in pay.
I'm also a manager and came here to say the same thing. Senior is a terminal level at plenty of mature companies. If you're in the startup world, you'll probably face big pressure to take on a Staff+ or manager title, but you can certainly successfully push against that if you have good rapport with the leadership team. I knew several engineers with decades of experience who were very happy being senior engineers in that world. They had their niches and knew them well. One had been writing email systems since the 90s, for example.
My company is very big too but if you want to be a good developer and you are happy with your normal salary increase everyone else gets, people will be happy about it because there is no budget anyway to give you a higher position.
I don't think this is a real issue if you are not wanting to make a lot of money.
Obviously some jobs and some managers may not "get" it, but, if you make it clear to your manager that your only interest is being an individual contributor, this should totally be possible. I have only ever managed once and don't really intend to do it again, simply because I am not particularly good at it. I don't think I've ever left a company because there is pressure to ascend to management, not even Google was pushing me towards that.
If you think about it, I'm sure you can think of coworkers around you that are in the boat of just being an IC long-term, usually working on specialist tasks. I think that's basically what you want, a niche that you can specialize in.
I've gone everywhere from CTO, Founder, staff engineer, product architect ... in totally non-linear fashions, sometimes in order, then in reverse ... been at this almost 30 years. Don't worry abut it, just do what you want.
I am a senior web developer (7 years of experience) and I also am pretty much comfortable where I am. The company that I work on is definitely happy with the arrangement too, as I don’t get (nor expect) aggressive salary raise and the company is not profitable and with a short runway.
Maybe that’s the spot, find a small company (doesn’t have to be a startup without cash). There won’t be place to grow, so they actually prefer someone without that kind of ambition.
> my current job has a very strong “up or out” mentality that I’m starting to push up against. And most other places I’ve worked at or talk about with friends seem to have similar attitudes toward career progression
Hmm, is this why must software products have tons of usability-destroying bugs that never get fixed, even while continually launching new features?
I think it's possible in some large companies. My company has very standardized process. You have a level, expectations for that level, and bonus or way out depending on how you compare with the baseline. As long as you perform at our above expectations, and that you're happy with your paycheck, you're fine.
So that brings a question. Let's say you're consultant (and the only senior consultants where I work are salesmen), and you're 42. How do you advance while remaining technical? I don't mind very occasional sales efforts, but not constantly.
Years ago I had a consulting project with sapient consulting in New Delhi (a consultant consulting for a consulting company) and I was impressed that they had a viable promotion track for engineers that only wanted to engineer and not manage people. No idea if they still do this.
look for smaller, private companies. They'll require you to do a broader range of tasks, but there's no progression because there's no hierarchy or formal management. Most of the devs I know who've been in the same role for longer than ~10 years work for < 50 people companies that will always be < 50 people companies.
Exactly. I feel constant ascendancy and the opportunity to do so would be a fortunate thing.
For OP, I feel there might be qualifiers that preclude such opportunities, like total comp or location. If you're looking for comp above the mid 100s or very low 200s at max, you're gonna struggle to find jobs that meet your criteria. On the converse side, these opportunities can be found in mid/low COL locations, so that number goes a lot farther.
there are lots of companies where promotions are very very rare. Find one. Look for companies where the current managers have been in their exact same role for 10 or 20 years or more.
do staff engineers really have increased responsibility & workload at your company? The distinction between staff and sr is kind of fake at most places I think. If anything, its just staff have more leeway to choose what to work on.
Depends on the company. Staff can mean somebody who...
- Has very specific domain expertise in an area critical to the company
- Can work across the stack and get a project done from 0 to 1 without throwing their hands up in defeat when they can't plow through it with SO/Copilot
- Gets a bunch of stuff out the door that management cares about
- Acts as technical lead on large cross-team initiatives
There's basically no consistency from company to company as to which of these truly qualifies somebody as Staff-level. As I'm so fond of pointing out there are places that call every non-Junior person a "Principal Engineer" and places that hire 24-year-olds as "Senior". Titles simply aren't fungible across companies. Show an Amazon employee this comment and they'll say that those first 3 are expected of a Senior engineer. I similarly was doing a lot of 2, 3, and 4 at a company that flat-out refused to promote me to Senior because I didn't meet some arbitrary HR criteria that they cooked up decades prior.
At this point I don't care what somebody calls me as long as I get paid market value to do things in a smart way with people that are well-intentioned.
Your dental offices needs an hour for a routine teeth cleaning.
Mine does it in six minutes. 10x, baby. I can't afford to waste my own precious 10x engineering time on sitting in a chair dealing with such a mundane affair. 10x all the things!
It's not about advancing. You're working in a stack ranked world where 2/3+ of your peers are on H1B visas are at risk of being deported (plus that's the culture of their home country). You could do the same job but just live in the EU and you'd be less likely to experience these woes.
The current place I'm at, and the last job I was at, do allow folks to hit the "senior/staff" and stay there. These are not FAANG and not early startups, but they're not exactly banks/utilities. These small-to-medium SaaS companies seem to find value in folks being effective in their roles for as long as those folks are willing to stay (duration, 3 years at each of these two employers, though I know folks who've been at each at their current level for 6+ years).
That kind of stability and valuing "being effective at the role your comfortable with" meant a lot to me. I also felt like I saw the best versions of each role and fewer folks stretching parts of themselves across different aspects of different roles.
Becoming old is one solution. Less expectation from older folks to move up if they are happy where they are. But as you know, it's a journey to get there :)
A more practical solution as people mentioned here, is staying away from big tech / corporate America.
Co-owner of a "consulting company" with partner(s) that are more into the business and management side of things, are cool with you mostly just coding, handling the software related fires, and help guiding, mostly independent, developers, as needed.
After 20 years, I was fortunate enough to know the right people, and be in the right places at the right time, for it to fall into my lap, so I have no advice on how to achieve that, but I never want to go back to regular employment again.
I had a weird career, waiter => build startup => sold => Google 7 years => left.
The bigs used to be great for this: the two problems a Googler manager has with talent management is A) motivating people who won't do work because they know they won't advance B) trying to placate people who work hard, when there's no significant reward for it, for years, and social mores mean there's no polite way to explain why.
Past that, and assuming you can just get a job wherever, I'd wonder why you want to actively not advance. You can't really say this to a manager with a straight face without getting "tsk tsk'd", even when everyone knows there's no real room for it. It'd get dissembled into not having a growth mindset or whatever if its actively voiced.
If you're looking for stability and WLB, my understanding of Amazon/FB from Googlers was they were somewhat ruthless in turning people over, and that's certainly gotten worse. And now it's happening at Google too, there's a defacto quota of ~10% of people who need to get hassled early. And it wasn't fair or rational necessarily who was.
For many companies 'senior' engineer is a terminal level, meaning you can continue on it and will be respected if you do so.
As you've said, both Staff or Eng. Manager role carry out more responsibility, as they are both leadership positions, one being more technical and the other more related to people.
There's a natural push for sending experienced people into the Staff/Manager bracket but I see plenty of people in their 40s and 50s working happily as a Senior Developer.
Get the same job working for government. Work stability in government is unparalleled, and there is so much cruft and technical debt that you will literally spend up until your last breath fixing legacy code and trying to get people off ancient software systems.
You will stagnate, and nobody will give a shit. People will come and go next to you, but you will be stable through the ages, like a pillar in an ancient Roman temple... Seasons will leave behind memories, but the winds will not take you with them. You will prevail, no matter what. Maybe forgotten, maybe overlooked, but more certainly not underestimated.
This basically shows why DOGE is a thing. This sort of attitude is why governments are slow to achieve anything, why any government contract ends up over budget, etc...
I await your downvotes.
If the government was a dynamic work environment, it would burn just as much money. But instead of saying "the project went over budget", they'd say "we executed a strategic pivot."
Instead of employees "stagnating", employees would launch all sorts of initiatives and then abandon them after getting promoted.
Instead of maintaining legacy systems for decades, teams would turn down systems so that employees can work on shinier greenfield projects, leaving users in the lurch.
I do not oppose government efficiency. I support reforms to identify and eliminate waste in government. Unfortunately that's not what DOGE is doing.
Have you checked on what’s going on in the government this year?
History tells that it isn't recommended to get a job in a fascist government, or one bordering it, maybe change to a democratic country
How can I do the opposite? Are they looking for collaborators?
I work in consulting. The best bet is not to work for the government. But to work for a consulting company that contracts with the government. You will get paid more. I use to work for a consulting department that focused on the public sector.
Mark Cuban has the same idea
https://qz.com/mark-cuban-elon-musk-doge-shark-tank-business...
Because it’s really easy to move to a foreign country and be legally allowed to work there.
Even with that, work security in government is still unparalleled. In the private sector, if the chief executive wanted to lay off 90% of the workforce, they could.
Compare the downsizing of Twitter to the downsizing of the government.
Literally the same guy is doing the downsizing with the same level of care. What are you talking about?
Lol, funny way to put it
I wouldn't be so sure considering what's happening with federal govt offices in the US right now..
Yep, I'm a federal contractor working in NIH as a data scientist, and completely agree with the above comment.
Before November, I would have said the same thing as the parent comment. After January 20th, everyone who is left is currently looking for backups in case they get laid off.
Gov and fed contractor positions used to be the most stable jobs you could get. Now, they are just as uncertain as industry jobs. It's extremely unfortunate.
I'd say that they are more uncertain than industry jobs at this point, unless you're talking about companies that have recently been taken over by private equity where the new owners intend to gut the place and sell off the parts.
> unless you're talking about companies that have recently been taken over by private equity where the new owners intend to gut the place and sell off the parts.
Off topic, but this is starting to feel like the rule rather than the exception. This practice should not be legal.
It's all about money, isn't it?
Sorry to hear... I hope this situation gets sorted sooner rather than later.
Defense contractors most likely do not share the same sentiment.
I don't think it's that different from the private sector. I've been with my current employer for almost 7 years. The company has been sold twice with layoffs. My manager, who hired me years ago, is leaving.
state & local are always options
yeah... There is always a niche in government. Plus, I haven't heard of many layoffs affecting software teams in government. Some people are so deeply rooted in their specific concerns that taking them out of a codebase is borderline like cutting the wrong cable on a bomb.
They shut down 18f, laying off the entire team.
Government adjacent jobs with NGOs that are not federal government funded might also be options.
A lot of NGOs are government funded, just through multiple layers of indirection, so they can claim they aren't.
how about working for state govts like IL or CA. I have friends in both but they are not worried (yet).
In the U.S., maybe somewhere like Naval Undersea Warfare Centers (at least when I worked there).
The problems they're solving are pretty constant, but they go very deep technically for those who are interested. There's a very long learning curve compared to most private sector jobs, but you can power through it in proportion to your personal ambitions.
Downsides: (1) You're a political punching bag for 50% of the candidates in each federal election, except in years where military power is on the electorates' minds. (2) Mediocre pay. (3) Soul-crushing bureaucracy. (4) It's the only job I've ever had where the employer has missed payroll.
Other pros: (1) Working with the same folks for many years can be nice. (2) Within limits, national defense is really important. If you want it done well, this is an opportunity to pitch in.
Caveat: invading Greenland or Panama isn't what I'd call "national defense". But the learning curve / hiring process are too cumbersome to quit and rejoin every 4 years depending on politics. I know of no good solution to this one.
I interviewed at NUWC Keyport when I was in college. Seemed like an interesting place to work but they didn’t have any real programming roles at the time. My interviewer asked if I had experience with UML and talked about how he wanted someone to document and optimize their assembly line procedures. I’m not sure he knew exactly what he wanted.
In my experience, tasking was really department-specific.
On the bright side, once you were inside and got your bearings, it was reasonably easy to get transferred to a department that better suited one's interests.
"National defense" as defense of nation's interests. Politicians can phrase it however they like. Pay is meh, benefits are pretty good if you locked into 0.4% FERS deduction prior 2013, that's like 16% annualized compounding... health insurance is getting less and less attractive by the year. Salary growth is also slow and next few years probably gonna be a big fat zero and eaten alive by inflation. Like OP said, it does feel like turning into a rock solid pillar and getting forgotten.
I was at NUWC Newport. Depending on the department, there was more or less programming to be done.
One option is to find a job that has legacy work. A good place to look is a non-tech company. IE: a company that might use tech to run the business (which you will support), but tech isn't their main product. These companies tend be using older software because they aren't really required to have the latest and greatest.
A pretty safe option is working for a utility company.
I've heard law firms are a good bet
Lots of large tech firms have defined career ladders with a concept of terminal levels - typically senior level beyond which there is no up-or-out expectation of growth. I think small and midsize companies that focus on fast growth will often carry this expectation, so I'd avoid those. Alternatively: small non-startups or large companies beyond their prime (again, lack of company-wide focus on rapid growth is key here).
Even there giving the impression of not wanting to advance is often a good way to mark yourself as a "low performer". A savvy understanding of politics is required in these circumstances.
Promos before the terminal level are easy because your manager wants to retain you. After the terminal level, they're used as carrots to squeeze more work out of you. One scenario to look out for is the company doing well. You realize your RSUs are worth more than job hopping, so you aim for adequate, but the company doesn't like that you opted out of the staff promo rat race.
these are the first people to go in times of trouble or politics, which is a real shame because the bulk of work in almost all companies is done by solid, experienced workers, not rockstar hierarchy climbers
> Has anyone worked somewhere that they felt they could just do their job without worrying about the career advancement aspect?
That's every place I've ever worked, to be honest, including tech megacorps. Lots of places will put a lot of emphasis on career advancement, but I've never seen anyone punished for not doing it. I'm not counting "won't get promoted" as a punishment, for obvious reasons.
My non-tech company seems to also have this up or out mentality. They don't have a specific timeline, but if you're a midlevel for too long like me, they definitely try to manage you out. I've had a few friends who are managers confirm this.
Yeah, you can run into it anywhere. When I was in the pizza delivery business in my early 20s, once you got into management, there was very much an up-or-out mentality. You couldn't just be a really good assistant manager; you were pushed to move up to manager and then to a bigger store and so on. It just seems to bother the climbers to see someone content to stay in the position he knows he's best suited for.
My theory is they want more than they pay for. They want to pay you the salary for Level X while you work hard to get to Level X+1
I have a disability, so I'm stuck where I'm at.
FB (10 years ago atleast) had a timelimit to go from L4 to L5
That's because L5 was the terminal senior level (whereas L4 is still mid-level).
Google as well
L5 and chill
The key is to keep switching teams. If you stay in same team for a long time, your manager will start pushing you for promotion, either because they like you and start feeling bad for you or maybe they are pressured by their higher ups.
Bloomberg. The terminal level on their IC ladder is "Senior". They have no formal concept of Staff or Principal engineer. People spend decades there.
Most of finance is flat (or two tiers at least - upper management and everyone else) - that was going to be my reccomendation.
Thirded. Plenty of 40+ geezers on trading desks who have been doing the same job for a decade or two (although that job changes constantly, of course).
But do they also receive the same salary?
Try to look for small/medium non-tech companies. There's quite a few out there that have dev teams but their primary product or service isn't software. The downside to that though is pay likely won't be as good as big tech, and sometimes they can be hit or miss with being able to work on exciting or new stuff.
I work for a medium-ish company (around 250 employees), and we're just a small team two devs, and a sysadmin basically and are pretty autonomous and there's no "up or out" expectation for anyone here.
There's definitely downsides - no one outside of our team has any technical ability whatsoever so communicating requirements back and forth is difficult, and a lot of the work is boring business CRUD and integrating SaaS products together, but it pays well enough and I love being pretty much autonomous on our small team. Most days it just fees like I'm a contractor.
All that being said, I'm almost 40 so I don't mind the boring enterprisey work. In my younger years this job would've burned me out super fast, just something to keep in mind.
Maybe just job-hop. Sure, you're a senior for 10 years at one company, then be a senior at another company for another 10 years. I know that's easier said than done, and could run into ageism as you get older.
I keep hearing about this "ageism" but it's never made sense to me. I would always want to hire an older, wiser developer, if I were calling the shots. Why is this a thing?
I'm 50+ and it's a thing, but not really different than any other bias lots of people here likey deal with. It's not legit but does make sense: any groups that you don't identify with are assessed differently based on the delta. Sometimes this is positive; most times negative.
It's definitely a thing.
Just one example: I was working at Stanford in the Med School and one of the admin people was forced out simply for the crime of being "old" without any specific performance problem or inability.
Another anecdotal negative confirmation: When I was 19, I was constantly offered jobs. You don't hear me singing that tune anymore.
I have been constantly offered jobs from the time I was 22 until last year when I was 50.
Older wiser developer has less tolerance for bullshit and wants higher pay. Older wiser developer is less likely to be on a visa because they've probably been working in the country for a while. They're less likely to be foreign as well because the giant surge of foreigners (Indian/Chinese) coming to US is something that has happened in the last 15 years. If you have 20+ years of experience in the US, you're much more likely to be American or at least a citizen or have a greencard.
In all senses, older developers want more and have a better positioning to negotiate from. For capitalists, this is exactly what they don't want.
It's not really ageism as much as it is the associations that come with older age. If you were as naive, desperate, and cheap as a new grad - you'd get more easily hired too. Oh and a lot of older devs don't like the grindy leetcode nature of interviews because it takes a lot of time outside of work to study for and they prefer to do other things with their time. (In half of my FAANG interviews, I get asked LC Hard problems regularly. The bar to pass is very high.)
I’m 50.
It has never taken me more than a month to get a job when I was looking and most of the time at least two offers.
I changed jobs when I was 25, 34, 37, 39, 41, 44, 46, 49 and 50.
My first only and hopefully last job in BigTech was at 46.
If you are old and have the experience, network and reputation you should have built based on your age, the world is your oyster.
If you don’t have experience with current technology, you’re screwed.
If you're getting hired based on network, then you don't know the struggle.
My network includes recruiters.
But if I look back.
- 2008 (34) - spammed job boards.
- 2012 (37) - reached out to third party recruiters via LinkedIn
- 2014 (40) - reached out to internal recruiter on LinkedIn
- 2016 (42) - reached out to a recruiter I met earlier.
- 2018 (44) - reached out to a recruiter I met earlier
- 2020 (46) - Amazon (AWS Professional Services) recruiter reached out to me.
- 2023 (49) - targeted outreach to a recruiter based on a niche of niche within AWS where I was an SME.
- 2024 - responded to recruiter who reached out to me.
To be fair, in 2020, I did pivot from “software developer” to working in cloud consulting specializing in app dev - working full time for consulting departments/companies
10 years rofl
Reframe it - no job has ever advanced you career wise. There's no curriculum, it's just a random hodpodge of tech stacks and features. If you advanced, that was on you. There was no professor or tutor there, no gun to your head, certainly no mom or dad. It was just you, your drive, your talent, and whatever you perceived as a challenge or trial. If you want to stop advancing, that's on you, as it always was.
Not on “up or out” companies. But, sure, my suggestion would be to find another company without that mentality
Most companies have a similar profile. There's an up-or-out phase and then there's some level where it no longer matters. Because titles are all over the place it's hard to predict what that level is. But it roughly translates to the point where your value exceeds your cost. For most software companies this is usually the point where one is a very capable IC, able to work independently, as well as able to guide & mentor more junior employees. YMMV
It will never be the case that it's okay to coast for a long time at the lower/middle levels because in the grand scheme of things you're not worth the hassle for them.
Try to think of this from the organisation's point of view. The up or out culture serves two purposes. It helps ensure senior roles go to people they know well and trust, and it ensures there is room for other ambitious and motivated people to move up.
In other words the whole objective is to have a well run organisation with motivated employees. The objective is definitely not to force hard working and talented people to leave.
If you are hard working and talented it's incredibly unlikely they will want to push you out and then go through the whole process of hiring and training a replacement. It's worth having a conversation with your manager before looking for a new job.
Yes. Once I was leaving a managerial role for a lateral transfer and helped choose my replacement. One candidate was a high performing individual contributor. They felt obligated to apply for the job, but didn't really want it. They liked their current job and did it well. They were assured that they're welcome to continue as an IC at their current level as long as they continue to perform at their current level.
Worked out great. They have their role and continue to enjoy it and perform well. The managerial role went to someone with clear upward intention, who is also enjoying it and performing well.
A good dev manager would be thrilled to have a senior like you on their team. Rockstars are great, but bedrock employees are better.
Become a contractor. They don’t get promotions. Or any other benefit except pay. So become an expensive contractor.
Personally working in smaller companies, startups (the scene probably ends somehow in 1-3 years) and academic organizations (professors have a career path, staff not) I find that no advancement is a norm.
Yep.
Startups though, ugh. Maybe tomorrow you will end up a millionaire with stock, or you're eating catfood and hoping the grocery bill difference will be enough to pay the mortgage next month while you desperately look for a job in the worst economy since 2008. If there's an in-between, I've never seen it personally.
There are zombie startups. The business has stalled out, but breaks even. The staff and investors are checked out. Ambitious product people show up with big ideas that never work and then leave. They keep going until someone finds a buyer or the business fails.
All startups that I worked paid very decently, just not FAANG level.
This no-in-between you describe is for founder only, I believe.
The ones I worked at paid me decently in terms of cash except for the one I tried to start myself. In those cases I was wanted for special skills and experience and not being a generic applications developer.
It's not unusual for people, in the case of an acqui-hire, to get a payout of $250k or so.
You'll work 60hrs a week "hardcore" for a Musk type for stock with a blackout period and multiple risks of massive dilution in any or all funding rounds.
Most startups will fail or "exit" with a sale that profits only a few key investors and insiders.
But eating catfood is always an good idea no matter your net worth.
As a cat owner I'd suggest that dog food is likely closer to a complete diet for humans. Cats are obligate carnivores, dogs are omnivores like us.
Also, most cat food smells pretty bad
OTOH, if you're barely able to afford food, if they're the same cost, high protein might be a good thing.
Completeness is more important than optimal balance. For example, a high protein diet is no good if you get scurvy because cats produce their own vitamin C and you don't (although dogs also don't need vitamin C, which suggests that a pet-food-only diet needs to include at least some guinea pig food)
Rice and beans are cheap and combining them, your body can use the protein.
Its less humorous to advocate a healthy low cost vegan diet than to suggest people eat cat food.
But I totally agree!
Qualcomm, at least until I left in 2017, had two parallel career tracks, one for management and another for individual contributors. Both had equal pay grades. It was up to you whether you wanted to follow one or the other.
So if your concern is that you don't want to become a manager while still being well paid, that is an option. Other than that, the culture was pretty nice, especially in the Markham (Canada) office.
Dual ladders is pretty common, though not equal pay IME, but I'd bet there's still a stigma attached to anyone who's not trying to move up one of those career paths?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
>> This outcome is inevitable, given enough time and enough positions in the hierarchy to which competent employees may be promoted.
So if you accept this, you need to find a place where there is no hierarchy: explicit, shadow or implicit.
Government. Though US Federal is a mess right now.
Second this. Public administration or sth. like that has no real growth targets and will therefore probably be more "relaxed" on that matter. Also that can be very valuable work if you provide good services to the people that live there.
Anecdotally, Netflix is very "settle into your groove and get really good at your job" if you want it to be. There are of course folks that climb the ladder, but I also work with several L5's (Senior engineers) who have been at that level for years. Some of this of course has to do with the introduction of levels being quite recent (within the last 4 years or so) but the majority of folks I know that have been here for 10+ years are at L5 (Senior Engineer, which is like 70% of the engineering staff). The vast majority of folks stay in their hired levels for their entire time at the company, and the salary increases are steady year-to-year. I'm personally trying to push my career forward into either L6 or management eventually, but I also get the distinct feeling that if I decided to settle into my role and not advance that I'd still be here and quite happy 5 years from now.
They introduced levels 2.5 years ago. Almost all existing engineers were converted to L5 at that time (I was told ~90% during a recent job interview there). A very small number of L6s were created when they introduced levels (something like 20 according to my interviewer). L4s are post-9/2022 hires.
All of which is to say, the fact that most people are L5s, including people who've been there for a long time, is due entirely to the very recent introduction of leveling and the high bar for L6. It tells you nothing on its own about whether L5 is perceived as a terminal level.
You'd know better than us if you work there, and reading between the lines of your comment it sounds like maybe it is?
What about L1, L2, L3 then ?
Unfortunately, they don’t respond to their job ads. Probably get too many responses.
I worked for all kinds of companies, big and small, corporate and startups, and I thought very few of them had much of the “up or out” mentality or even opportunities. So every time I wanted “up”, I basically moved elsewhere. It seemed to me that most teams and most people actually prefer that stability and didn’t push others either.
I've mostly worked as an IC and a manager in technical organizations outside of VC backed startup land. In those orgs I've found that most places consider 'Senior Engineer' to be a terminal level. By that I mean until you get to senior engineer it us up or out. In fact, as I manager, I've had explicit timelines on which I've had to get people to senior, or manage them out. Once you DO get to senior engineer they are happy to let you stay there forever because a) senior engineers are what keeps the tech org going day to day b) the staff+ path and management path are not just 'up' from senior - they are actually different jobs from senior requiring a different skillset. The downside of this is don't expect anything more than cost-of-living increases in pay.
I'm also a manager and came here to say the same thing. Senior is a terminal level at plenty of mature companies. If you're in the startup world, you'll probably face big pressure to take on a Staff+ or manager title, but you can certainly successfully push against that if you have good rapport with the leadership team. I knew several engineers with decades of experience who were very happy being senior engineers in that world. They had their niches and knew them well. One had been writing email systems since the 90s, for example.
My company is very big too but if you want to be a good developer and you are happy with your normal salary increase everyone else gets, people will be happy about it because there is no budget anyway to give you a higher position.
I don't think this is a real issue if you are not wanting to make a lot of money.
Obviously some jobs and some managers may not "get" it, but, if you make it clear to your manager that your only interest is being an individual contributor, this should totally be possible. I have only ever managed once and don't really intend to do it again, simply because I am not particularly good at it. I don't think I've ever left a company because there is pressure to ascend to management, not even Google was pushing me towards that.
If you think about it, I'm sure you can think of coworkers around you that are in the boat of just being an IC long-term, usually working on specialist tasks. I think that's basically what you want, a niche that you can specialize in.
I've gone everywhere from CTO, Founder, staff engineer, product architect ... in totally non-linear fashions, sometimes in order, then in reverse ... been at this almost 30 years. Don't worry abut it, just do what you want.
I am a senior web developer (7 years of experience) and I also am pretty much comfortable where I am. The company that I work on is definitely happy with the arrangement too, as I don’t get (nor expect) aggressive salary raise and the company is not profitable and with a short runway.
Maybe that’s the spot, find a small company (doesn’t have to be a startup without cash). There won’t be place to grow, so they actually prefer someone without that kind of ambition.
At least, it works for me so far
> my current job has a very strong “up or out” mentality that I’m starting to push up against. And most other places I’ve worked at or talk about with friends seem to have similar attitudes toward career progression
Hmm, is this why must software products have tons of usability-destroying bugs that never get fixed, even while continually launching new features?
Spot on product managers are constantly pushing for new features (for their growth) so quality goes on the wayside.
I think it's possible in some large companies. My company has very standardized process. You have a level, expectations for that level, and bonus or way out depending on how you compare with the baseline. As long as you perform at our above expectations, and that you're happy with your paycheck, you're fine.
Try consulting. Once your reach Senior Consultant level it's pretty much the end of the path for ICs.
So that brings a question. Let's say you're consultant (and the only senior consultants where I work are salesmen), and you're 42. How do you advance while remaining technical? I don't mind very occasional sales efforts, but not constantly.
Years ago I had a consulting project with sapient consulting in New Delhi (a consultant consulting for a consulting company) and I was impressed that they had a viable promotion track for engineers that only wanted to engineer and not manage people. No idea if they still do this.
Actually, most non-swe jobs are like that. I mean check how inefficient any other industry is.
If you want to stay in swe, government jobs are the best, of you can get in as a permanent employee, not as a contractor.
Have you talked to your manager about it? I’m at a large tech company and I know people who have requested to stay at their current level.
look for smaller, private companies. They'll require you to do a broader range of tasks, but there's no progression because there's no hierarchy or formal management. Most of the devs I know who've been in the same role for longer than ~10 years work for < 50 people companies that will always be < 50 people companies.
Dead end jobs are the norm from what I've seen.
Exactly. I feel constant ascendancy and the opportunity to do so would be a fortunate thing.
For OP, I feel there might be qualifiers that preclude such opportunities, like total comp or location. If you're looking for comp above the mid 100s or very low 200s at max, you're gonna struggle to find jobs that meet your criteria. On the converse side, these opportunities can be found in mid/low COL locations, so that number goes a lot farther.
there are lots of companies where promotions are very very rare. Find one. Look for companies where the current managers have been in their exact same role for 10 or 20 years or more.
do staff engineers really have increased responsibility & workload at your company? The distinction between staff and sr is kind of fake at most places I think. If anything, its just staff have more leeway to choose what to work on.
Depends on the company. Staff can mean somebody who...
- Has very specific domain expertise in an area critical to the company
- Can work across the stack and get a project done from 0 to 1 without throwing their hands up in defeat when they can't plow through it with SO/Copilot
- Gets a bunch of stuff out the door that management cares about
- Acts as technical lead on large cross-team initiatives
There's basically no consistency from company to company as to which of these truly qualifies somebody as Staff-level. As I'm so fond of pointing out there are places that call every non-Junior person a "Principal Engineer" and places that hire 24-year-olds as "Senior". Titles simply aren't fungible across companies. Show an Amazon employee this comment and they'll say that those first 3 are expected of a Senior engineer. I similarly was doing a lot of 2, 3, and 4 at a company that flat-out refused to promote me to Senior because I didn't meet some arbitrary HR criteria that they cooked up decades prior.
At this point I don't care what somebody calls me as long as I get paid market value to do things in a smart way with people that are well-intentioned.
Many smaller companies are what you describe.
The pay will probably be less, but it is a trade-off.
Dentist
My dentist is a principal dentist
Are they a rockstar dentist tho?
Mine's a 10x dentist.
Your dental offices needs an hour for a routine teeth cleaning.
Mine does it in six minutes. 10x, baby. I can't afford to waste my own precious 10x engineering time on sitting in a chair dealing with such a mundane affair. 10x all the things!
Rather painful, though.
I replaced my dentist with ChatGPT
If you're an expert with FLOSS software.
It's not about advancing. You're working in a stack ranked world where 2/3+ of your peers are on H1B visas are at risk of being deported (plus that's the culture of their home country). You could do the same job but just live in the EU and you'd be less likely to experience these woes.
You neglect to mention "for 30% of the pay". And that's in western Europe. Except perhaps Luxembourg, where you might actually find 50% of US pay.
The current place I'm at, and the last job I was at, do allow folks to hit the "senior/staff" and stay there. These are not FAANG and not early startups, but they're not exactly banks/utilities. These small-to-medium SaaS companies seem to find value in folks being effective in their roles for as long as those folks are willing to stay (duration, 3 years at each of these two employers, though I know folks who've been at each at their current level for 6+ years).
That kind of stability and valuing "being effective at the role your comfortable with" meant a lot to me. I also felt like I saw the best versions of each role and fewer folks stretching parts of themselves across different aspects of different roles.
Becoming old is one solution. Less expectation from older folks to move up if they are happy where they are. But as you know, it's a journey to get there :)
A more practical solution as people mentioned here, is staying away from big tech / corporate America.
Co-owner of a "consulting company" with partner(s) that are more into the business and management side of things, are cool with you mostly just coding, handling the software related fires, and help guiding, mostly independent, developers, as needed.
After 20 years, I was fortunate enough to know the right people, and be in the right places at the right time, for it to fall into my lap, so I have no advice on how to achieve that, but I never want to go back to regular employment again.
I had a weird career, waiter => build startup => sold => Google 7 years => left.
The bigs used to be great for this: the two problems a Googler manager has with talent management is A) motivating people who won't do work because they know they won't advance B) trying to placate people who work hard, when there's no significant reward for it, for years, and social mores mean there's no polite way to explain why.
Past that, and assuming you can just get a job wherever, I'd wonder why you want to actively not advance. You can't really say this to a manager with a straight face without getting "tsk tsk'd", even when everyone knows there's no real room for it. It'd get dissembled into not having a growth mindset or whatever if its actively voiced.
If you're looking for stability and WLB, my understanding of Amazon/FB from Googlers was they were somewhat ruthless in turning people over, and that's certainly gotten worse. And now it's happening at Google too, there's a defacto quota of ~10% of people who need to get hassled early. And it wasn't fair or rational necessarily who was.
For many companies 'senior' engineer is a terminal level, meaning you can continue on it and will be respected if you do so.
As you've said, both Staff or Eng. Manager role carry out more responsibility, as they are both leadership positions, one being more technical and the other more related to people.
There's a natural push for sending experienced people into the Staff/Manager bracket but I see plenty of people in their 40s and 50s working happily as a Senior Developer.
has your job security actually been threatened or is this another episode of Using Ask HN as My Therapist